Gorgeous East

by null

  4.

  The Minister of Tourism and Social Intercourse for the Southern Provinces of the Kingdom of Morocco—which is what the Moroccans called the Non-Self-Governing Territory in official press releases—sat in his new air-conditioned office in Laayoune’s tallest building, the twelve-story Bureau du Tourisme et du Commerce, listening with thinly veiled skepticism to Pinard’s fake business plan presentation. Pinard and Szbeszdogy and the quartet of assassins from the 4e RE that made up the covert personnel of Mission: SCORPIO were masquerading as an advance team sent out by the Club Med organization to assess the suitability of the string of dingy beaches beyond the dunes—the Playa Laayoune—as the site for a new addition to the franchise.

  The air-conditioning in the minister’s office, set to deep freeze, blasted out of two ducts in the ceiling. The minister, a sleek, self-satisfied man with a nose like a hawk’s beak and a carefully combed beard, wore a black wool djellah, usually intended for winter wear, its sleeves and neck figured with gold embroidery. At one point during the presentation, he actually pulled the hood up to warm his ears.

  Pinard, shivering, almost asked if the air-conditioning might be turned down, but didn’t. He put a fake flow chart on the portable easel he’d brought and rambled on. His brief briefing back in Aubagne had been delivered by two chipper Club Med reps—Club Med has always been friendly to Legion activities in the East, their fun-in-the-sun-in-exotic-places vacation packages being, in a way, the final incarnation of discredited French colonialist ideology. Pinard had come provided with all the essential facts and figures, with reams of promotional materials, with tapes of actual Club Med presentations, which he’d listened to over and over again in preparation for this meeting today. But the niceties of business-speak now escaped him. There was a reason he’d gone into the profession of arms and not into business; for the latter, despite his earlier career as a criminal entrepreneur, he felt only the most profound contempt. Also he wasn’t very good at number crunching.

  “. . . to be considered while calculating construction budgets,” Pinard was droning now, “but not including marketing and advertising costs, which will be folded into the budgets of other divisions for accounting purposes—at least initially. We are now telling management in Paris—”

  Suddenly, he drew a blank. An uncomfortable silence followed. The minister tapped his glossy fingernails on his glossy desk and waited. Szbeszdogy, sitting in a chair across the room directly beneath the air-conditioning duct, was frozen by more than a fear of public speaking.

  “I’m sorry, monsieur le ministre,” Pinard said at last. “Where was I?”

  “You were talking about profit margins,” the minister said dryly.

  “Ah! Yes! Well, we’re talking about a profitability factor of, oh—17.5 percent.”

  The minister raised an eyebrow. “A few minutes ago you mentioned a 12 percent rate.”

  “Of course I did!” Pinard blustered. “But that’s not quite accurate. Allow me to recalculate—” He scratched some unintelligible figures on his pad, then scratched them off. “Let’s say 15 percent,” he said, wagging his head. “Yes, that’s fair. Just to be on the safe side.”

  All this was nothing but the freshest merde, and the minister’s merde detector was switched to on. He pulled down his hood and swiveled his office chair toward Szbeszdogy, freezing on the other side of the room.

  “Who are you again?” the minister said.

  “I am Alphonse Pique,” Szbeszdogy said, thankfully remembering his covert identity. “A French businessman.”

  The minister grunted at this. “You don’t look French.”

  “And yet I am,” Szbeszdogy said.

  “What is your role in this undertaking?”

  “I am a marketing expert,” Szbeszdogy said, his tone flat, robotic. “I am also his assistant.”

  “And what do you assist?”

  “Eh bien, tout!” Everything.

  The minister glanced at Pinard’s prospectus again, this time studying it with a careful eye. This particular document had been prepared by Club Med economists years ago for a never-built resort in Honduras, along the Mosquito Coast. Pertinent sections were written in Spanish, budgets given in pre-euro French francs and Honduran dollars.

  “The document we have here does not seem to pertain at all,” the minister said, tossing it across his desk. “First, it’s written in Spanish.”

  “That is intended as an example only, monsieur le ministre,” Pinard said desperately. “It is the type of document we will be preparing, that is after we have concluded our fact-finding mission in your beautiful country.”

  The minister’s expression darkened. “Monsieur Deschafeaux, is there some other reason for your sojourn in Laayoune?”

  Pinard looked at him blankly. “We are the representatives of Club Med France,” he said. “Would you care to examine our passports? Our documents?”

  “Passports and documents can be forged.” The minister shrugged.

  Pinard opened his mouth to protest, but the minister interrupted.

  “Suppose I agree that you are who you say you are. Then I must say that your superiors are ridiculously guilty of bad business practice. In all honesty, now is not the time for Club Med or any other European touristic concern to build one of their outposts here. In ten years perhaps, when the Southern Provinces has been more firmly integrated into the kingdom of Morocco and infrastructures have been improved—but now, with these fanatical Marabouts gaining strength and Polisario issues still unresolved—” He made a gesture, easily translated, that meant something like you people are absolutely crazy.

  An uncomfortable silence followed. The air conditioner whirred away. A telex machine clattered from the next room. The minister rose from his chair to indicate the conclusion of the interview.

  Pinard gathered his materials; Szbeszdogy unfroze himself and pushed up, his bones creaking with the cold. The minister ushered them through the reception area, where young Moroccan men in shiny new suits performed the menial office support jobs usually allocated to women in more enlightened societies. They crossed to the elevators and stood there for a while, waiting.

  “A question,” the minister said at last. “Have either of you gentlemen experienced lengthy periods of military service?”

  “No,” Pinard said carefully. “That is, apart from a year in the Boy Scouts.”

  “The military life doesn’t appeal to me,” Szbeszdogy said. This, at least, was the truth.

  “Why do you ask?” Pinard said.

  The minister scratched his beard. “There is a distinct military demeanor about the both of you—” he began, but was interrupted by the elevator, its interior all polished stainless steel. To Pinard’s surprise, the minister entered with them, pressing the button for the lobby. They rode down most of the way in silence, then Pinard said, “We’ll get some current numbers for you in a couple of weeks. Allow me to apologize for the disjointed manner of the presentation you just heard. Unfortunately I suffer from recurring bouts of malaria. . . .”

  The minister did not respond to these lies. Then, the door opened on the glare of the lobby, all polished marble and tall, tinted plate-glass windows overlooking the blazing plaza beyond.

  “Twelve floors!” the minister announced proudly. He didn’t exit the elevator. “It’s the tallest building in Laayoune. I like to ride up and down to remind myself of the Moroccan achievement in the Southern Provinces! When we came here twenty-five years ago, Laayoune was a miserable little town with dirt streets, nothing but a few Spanish army bunkers and that terrible souk! Yes, the souk is still here, but look at what we’ve done with the rest!”

  Pinard and Szbeszdogy stepped into the lobby. The elevator door began to close, but the minister put out an arm to hold it open.

  “Pursue your business ventures, gentlemen, whatever they may be,” he said in a low voice. “Though I doubt it has anything to do with Club Med. Frankly, I suspect illegal activity.”

  “That is ab
solutely not—” Pinard began, but the minister silenced him again with a glance.

  “Illegal activity, despite what my superiors might think, is also a part—indeed, a most important part—of the Moroccan economy. See to it, however, that I am personally allotted at least 22.5 percent of whatever undertaking you have in mind. If you do not remit to me this percentage and I find out about it, I will see to it that you are arrested and thrown into prison for a very long time. Good day.”

  Smiling, he removed his arm and the elevator door closed with a pneumatic hush and the stainless-steel box lifted him unseen to his frozen lair on the twelfth floor.

  5.

  A week passed.

  Pinard didn’t see the woman again, though he went back to the Colline des Oiseaux several times and wandered the rustling alleys there, hoping and also dreading to catch a glimpse of her slim, enticing form. She was still under surveillance, a duty he had wisely delegated to Szbeszdogy. But if Pinard came to the Colline and the woman came to the Colline at more or less the same hour, and they should happen to meet. . . .

  He found himself each time stopping to visit the mournful bird of paradise in its cage, which, seemingly immobile, hadn’t budged from the same spot on the topmost branch of the artificial tree. You and me both, brother, the bird whispered to Pinard’s inner ear, you and me both!

  6.

  Meanwhile, Laayoune lay stranded between Sahara and Atlantic on its miserable, waterless peninsula of sand. It’s a dull, dusty town, the kind of place that has been a special torment for the Legion for more than a century and a half. Clouds of fine, irritating sand blew through the streets when the simoom came from east to west, which it did at least twice a day. The soccer stadium was always empty, its green plastic Astroturf field nearly covered in sandy drifts. The sole movie theater, its faded marquee still advertising a notorious Saudi film involving rapacious demons in the guise of American troops, had been closed for years. Three or four overpriced hotels loomed along the avenue Ksar el-Kebir, two of them with bad expensive lobby bars, which were, in fact, the only bars in Laayoune; at one of these malingered a few local prostitutes, ugly and even more expensive than the watered-down booze. There was nothing to do in Laayoune worth doing, not for a Legionnaire.

  A mysterious affliction called le cafard comes upon the Legion in such places, at remote outposts and mountain forts overlooking unending miles of sand and rock, in dull garrison towns. It resembles a disease of the brain and is sometimes accompanied by inexplicable fevers, but is not a physical ailment, not exactly. It is a spiritual malady, halfway between ennui and suicide, that has something to do with seeing the same old faces every day and drinking far too much of the same old bad wine and not being, in a general sense, fit company for oneself. It is a kind of madness that descends out of the hot, white African sky and has extracted its toll of Legionnaires over the years, with a mortality rate nearly twice that of syphilis or the battlefield.

  In the days of the desert forts a century ago, Legionnaires with a bad case of cafard struck out alone into the wilderness following a glittering mirage of cool water and bathing beauties and never returned; or mutinied and attacked their CO with a Senegalese coupe-coupe, a deadly blade like a large butcher knife; or shot themselves in the head with their Lebel rifles, an unlucky weapon for the purposes of suicide: The Lebel must be placed on its butt, business end of the long barrel in the mouth, bare toe on the trigger, an awkward firing position, particularly for short men, and one that often caused not death, but horrible, disfiguring facial injuries. Or they simply lay down, muttering to themselves about how they’d been cheated in life and unfairly maligned at every turn, and cursing the miserable fate of being alive, turned their faces to the wall, and died.

  The only known cures for cafard are battle, death, or an immediate transfer to Paris (the latter, it is generally agreed, can cure anything), whichever comes first.

  Now, over the course of the hot idle days, with excruciating slowness, like a chicken roasting in its own juices, the officer and men of Mission: SCORPIO began to fester, to grow irritable or grow melancholy or both, increasingly unsure of their purpose. They disobeyed orders, they drank much more than they were supposed to, they masturbated, shamefully, in secret. This was the beginning of le cafard, which, however it ended, always first manifested itself as a violent breakdown of the famously hard-earned discipline of the Legion.

  7.

  Sun blasted down on the courtyard of the Hotel Agadir like a death ray from outer space. It was almost noon. The hyperchlorinated pool steamed in the heat, faintly poisonous. Anyone with any sense took refuge during these miserable hours in the dim covered alleys of the souk or in air-conditioned Western-style rooms. Hooded brown bundles that were the indigenous male population of the city napped in their djellahs beneath the cool arcades of the Djoune el Fina and in other shadowy corners. The many cement monuments to Moroccan casualties of the Polisario war gleamed glaringly white out in the empty plazas—like a detail from one of de Chirico’s mysterious urban landscapes.

  The four death squad commandos of the 4e RE lay drunk off sixty bottles of Kronenbourg in European-cut Speedos on canvas beach chairs in direct sunlight on the pebbly concrete, poolside at the Agadir. They’d been drinking steadily since 8:00 A.M., despite direct orders from Capitaine Pinard not to touch alcohol until after sundown and then only in the strictest moderation. Their muscled, tattooed torsos gleamed with cheap tanning lotions; the coconut stink of this stuff, mixed with the alcoholic fumes of Kronenbourg, the sickly-sweet musty smell of Basta, and rancid body sweat, hung in a cloud more poisonous than the evaporating chlorine in the stifling air.

  The waiter, a sweaty, diminutive Saharoui named Nur’din, hopped back and forth from the Agadir’s wine cellar, laden with large brass trays full of more bottles of Kro. When the supplies ran dry, management sent Nur’din next door to the Hotel Plaza d’Afrique for two more cases, which he brought back on his narrow shoulders, cursing and struggling. He had made a paper sun hat out of the front pages of Le Soir du Maroc, the French-language newspaper from Marrakesh, and it flopped comically on his head as he raced around the pool distributing the beers. The 4e RE assassins found the hat very funny and held chugging contests with one another just to see the waiter run around in the heat, hat flopping, popping open the warmish bottles as fast as they could drink them.

  “Eh, la, l’admiral! Une autre Kro! Suis soif ici!” More beer, Admiral. One more Kro! Hop to it!

  “This fucking beer tastes like hot piss!”

  “Hey, you evil dwarf—get me another one!”

  “Come on, Admiral! Move your nigger ass!”

  This out of the mouth of the blackest of the bunch, so black he was almost purple: Legionnaire Amédée Dessalines, a Haitian from the Cité Soleil slum of Port-au-Prince. Dessalines, once a foot soldier in a pro-Aristide militia group, had fled that miserable island as a result of his role in an atrocity so horrible it succeeded in revolting even the atrocity-jaded natives of Haiti. Dessalines bore a jagged white scar around his neck, the mark of a barbed-wire harness his executioners had trussed him with in preparation for the voodoo sacrifice he’d somehow escaped. After such an escape, cursed by the voodoo gods, reviled by all Haiti, his only refuge was the Legion.

  The other 4e RE assassins were easily as tough and murderous as Dessalines: Legionnaire Hector Babenco, a former Basque terrorist, had bombed a bus full of schoolchildren and nuns on the Malaga road. Legionnaire Vladimir Vladimirovitch, a thick-skulled blunt instrument the size of a tank, was a Russian army veteran of the bloody fighting in Chechnya. But none of them could match Caporal-chef Gil Solas, in terms of sheer lethality. Solas was a slight, soft-spoken, tawny-skinned Brazilian, his demeanor almost feminine, with a fine aquiline nose and soft green eyes that glowed at night like the eyes of a cat. He played bossa nova on the guitar and never went without a girlfriend, but this smooth café Brasiliano facade concealed an unrepentant monster: In his youth, Solas had been the chief exec
utioner for one of Rio’s most notorious favela gangs. He had killed men, women, children, cats and dogs. He had killed with his bare hands, with bottle caps flattened and sharpened like razor blades, with broken car antennas, rocks, tire irons, and once with a sealed birthday gourd full of hard red candies.

  Being called a nigger by Dessalines was enough to make the long-suffering Nur’din lose his temper at last.

  “My nigger ass!” the waiter shouted, enraged, stamping his small feet. “Black fiend! You cannot treat a proud Saharoui with such disrespect! You are nothing but a slave! A nigger-black African! I beat you with my shoe!”

  “You are mistaken,” Dessalines hissed, uncoiling menacingly from his beach chair. “Now you will eat those words.”

  “Nigger cur from hell!” Nur’din shouted. And he tossed his tray full of Kronenbourgs into the cactus bed beside the pool—a few of them broke open and began to spew foam into the sand—seized the paper hat from his head and lunged for the white scar around Dessalines’s throat. Powerful as he was, the Haitian had a difficult time peeling the little waiter’s hands away. They performed a violent dance, Nur’din swearing and spitting and grappling, Dessalines laughing, making sarcastic comments—“Regardez les mecs! Look at the admiral! He’s a real battleship!” But his demeanor, now without a trace of humor, gave off a lethal seriousness.

  The other 4e RE assassins watched from their beach chairs, the whites of their eyes red-rimmed and yellow with alcohol-induced jaundice. It occurred to none of them to break up this mismatched fight; it did occur to them that Dessalines would probably kill the waiter and that this result might make an interesting spectacle, a break from monotonous routine. Now, Dessalines caught Nur’din across the face with a backhanded blow so hard it knocked the little man out of his shoes and sprawling into the cactus bed. Then he grabbed up Nur’din by his stockinged feet and turned him upside down and shook and shook until the contents of the waiter’s pockets fell to the ground: a pen knife, some keys attached to a small compass embedded in a toy rubber tire, silver coins, and a few hundred Moroccan dirhams, large colorful bills worth no more than a couple of euros. Finally, an embroidered Muslim cap worn during evening prayers.